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Theme: Turkey

Fiction

Father died in front of the forbidden tv channel

“Roj TV” has often been accused of being the mouthpiece of the Kurdish armed movement, PKK. The programs are broadcast in Kurdish from Denmark and Belgium and the Turkish government has repeatedly...

Text: Yavuz Ekinci January 08 2013
Poetry

Forbidden chirping

“Humor is the foremost weapon of the weak,” said Turkish author Aziz Nesin. In this short play, the artist and poet Yeşim Ağaoğlu uses humor to show what is unrolling in her native country. Ağaoğlu...

TEXT: Yeşim Ağaoğlu January 08 2013
Poetry

Writing letters on water

Trials without end, shady evidence, and fabricated documents are a reality in today’s Turkish judicial system. Translator Petek Demir was tired of seeing his writer and journalist colleagues...

Text: Petek Demir January 08 2013
Article

A bomb of a book, a Molotov cocktail of a news story

Journalist İrfan Aktan knows how to avoid time in prison: through self-censorship. More than a hundred journalists are presently being held in Turkey for either their own news reports or the political...

Text: İrfan Aktan January 08 2013
Poetry

Kamber Ates, how are you?

Gülsum Cengiz is one of the most acclaimed poets in Turkey. She wrote this poem during the 90s when Kurdish was a forbidden language in the prisons. In order to talk to her imprisoned son, a Kurdish...

Text: Gülsüm Cengiz January 08 2013
Article

Language is your innermost line of defense

The right to use the Kurdish language has been one of the major issues of controversy in Turkey during the republic’s entire existence. In recent years, the situation has been dedramatized and it is...

Text: Ayhan Geverî January 08 2013
Article

Turkey passes Iran and China

Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) is a New York-based, independent, nonprofit organization that works to safeguard press freedom worldwide. Here we present their recent report about Turkey.

Text: Committee to Protect Journalists January 08 2013
Article

Emel Gülcan: “Elimination through detention”

In the late 90s, several Turkish media outlets decided to build a common network, “Bianet,” to help each other meet the numerous threats facing the freedom of speech at the time. The 1990s were a dark...

Text: Emel Gülcan January 08 2013
Fiction

Film director and daughter of a guerrilla leader

The author is viewed as one of Turkey’s most exciting young filmmakers. In the below, she describes her encounter with the limits of freedom of speech and what happened when she wanted to make a movie...

Text: Anonymous January 08 2013
Article

John Ralston Saul: “It must end”

PEN International has directed its spotlight on the situation in Turkey, which has been afflicted with serious throwbacks in the field of freedom of speech. Reforms aimed at opening up the society...

Text: John Ralston Saul January 08 2013
Article

Democracy in disguise

Turkey has recently carried out several reforms rendering the country more democratic. At the same time, the same government imprisons increasing numbers of writers and opponents of the regime. How...

Text: Muhsin Kızılkaya January 08 2013

Theme: #6 2012

Poetry

Modern Persian lyric

Day by day, the censorship in Iran becomes stricter. The young Iranian poet Leili Galehdaran has therefore chosen to send her third collection, Sinior to the Swedish-located publisher Baran. If she...

Text: Leili Galehdaran September 27 2012
Article

“We should be free rather than behind bars"

The Russian state is tightening its grip over the church, the media and the courts. Russia claims to be a democracy, but the sentence against the three members of the punk band Pussy Riot could not...

Text: Nadezhda Tolokonnikova September 27 2012
Poetry

The ICORN-relay: Sedigheh Vasmaghi

In April the Swedish city of Uppsala received a new ICORN writer: the Iranian lawyer and poet Sedigheh Vasmaghi. After the election in 2009, she took part of the protest movement. She published poems...

Text: Sedigheh Vasmaghi September 27 2012
Fiction

Numbers, people

Aslı Erdoğan is one of the foremost writers in Turkey, who never shies away from sensitive topics. She has suffered harassment for her work and has been forced to live in exile. Despite this, she has...

Text: Aslı Erdoğan September 27 2012
Article

Journalists in prison: A survival manual

In the last few months, the repression in Belarus has tightened even more. Iryna Chalip, correspondent in Belarus for the Russian newspaper Novaja Gazeta, tells us about the recent attacks on freedom...

Text: Iryna Chalip September 27 2012
Article

It is not far between Stockholm and Minsk

The diplomatic crisis between Belarus and Sweden goes much deeper than to the recent “teddy bear incident”. The poet and former president candidate Uladzimir Njakljajeu, who was imprisoned after the...

Text: Uladzimir Njakljajeu, Nils Håkanson September 27 2012
Poetry

The bridge

It is way too early to talk about the “results” of the revolution in Egypt. Some commentators worry about that everything will remain the way it was, but the Egyptian writer Somaya Ramadan sees a slow...

Text: Somaya Ramadan September 27 2012
Article

The library in the torture centre

Books and the written word have always invoked fear in dictatorial regimes. Martin Ezpeleta visits the Library of Forbidden Books in the Argentinian city Córdoba, and reminds us of one of the military...

Text: Martin Ezpeleta September 27 2012

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